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Well Jupiter is going to be very bright tonight and for the next
several nights. As it rises in the east you'll be able to
see it in the Virgo constellation. It will rise; it'll be
up all night. The reason it's such a great time to see Jupiter is because
it's at a position in its orbit we call opposition, which means it's on the
opposite side of the Earth from the Sun, which means it's relatively close to the Earth
in its orbit. Which makes it appear relatively bright
and big in the night sky. So it's a wonderful time to take a glimpse at Jupiter.
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Well we've taken advantage of the fact that Jupiter
is relatively close to the Earth to use the Hubble Space
Telescope to take a nice, new snapshot. So this beautiful image from Hubble
shows great detail of Jupiter's atmosphere.
You can see these gorgeous atmospheric bands, different colors.
They represent the different parts of the atmosphere, sometimes
moving at different velocities around the planet. You can also see features
of storms on Jupiter. That famous Great Red Spot.
which is bigger than two Earths that could fit inside. Whirling around
but there are other storms cropping. You can see some little white ovals
there are other storms cropping up as well. So Jupiter as we're learning
is a very dynamic planet. Lots of action, lots of changes over
time. You know we're also looking at Jupiter with other kinds of
instruments and telescopes. We've used the Hubble to look at the poles
of Jupiter and see the auroras. Jupiter
has powerful auroras just like Earth has the northern lights.
Well Jupiter's are even stronger. Jupiter has a strong magnetic field, which
feeds that activity. And in ultraviolet light, we've been able to see these auroras dancing
around as well.
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Well we're seeing changes over time and
one thing that's helping us is that we're able to use multiple
eyes to look at Jupiter. So the Juno probe that NASA
launched has arrived at Jupiter. It's orbiting the planet. It's giving us
close up images in detail of the different atmospheric bands
and changes over time. And that we can compare with the images we're seeing from Hubble
from a distance to really get a better overall
picture of the planet. We're also learning about the interactions of the magnetic
field, with the conditions on Jupiter itself. And we're learning a lot about
Jupiter's moons as well which are intriguing.
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Well because Hubble has been operating for decades
now, we've been able to look at Jupiter repeatedly over the years,
and as we do we see something really intriguing and that is the fact that
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is changing over time. It's not always
the same color. It's not always the same shape. In fact it's getting rounded over
time and smaller over time. It seems to be shrinking. We don't really know why.
But it's telling us that there's a lot of dynamical activity on Jupiter
well worthy of further study.
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Well Europa is intriguing because its
a moon, it's an icy moon, an ice-crusted moon, but there
are plenty of reasons to believe that there's a liquid ocean, liquid water
liquid ocean under that ice crust. So we're very curious to know of course
if there's liquid water, could it be habitable for life? That kind of thing.
Lately we had a wonderful discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope
of evidence that there are plumes of water vapor being
expelled from between cracks in the ice of Europa.
And these plumes which have been seen several times now
may be a way that we can sample that water from the atmosphere
from the inside, at least at first, and learn something about the nature of the water under the
ice.
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There's all kinds of information about Hubble and access to the
gallery of Hubble images at the website NASA.GOV/HUBBLE.
And we're also reachable on Twitter @NASAHubble.